The Causley
With encouragement from Poems on the Underground, I am tiptoeing into the late Charles Causley, the least modern of modern poets. He strikes me as the anti-Wallace Stevens, his language plain instead of elaborate and his metaphysics traditional rather than modern. He is similar to Stevens, however, in that it often takes a while (if ever) to fully figure out exactly what is going on.
Reading Causley makes me uncomfortable in various ways. Like Eliot, his moves along trippingly, even on turgid topics his sublime fluency is always on display. And when I am done with this delicious meal, I usually feel, as he intends, a bit unwell:
Timothy Winters
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.
When teacher talks he won't hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the patterns off his plate
And he's not even heard of the Welfare State.
Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren't boys like him any more.
Old man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier.
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy's dosed with an aspirin.
The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.
At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars "Amen!"
So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says "Amen
Amen amen amen amen."
Timothy Winters, Lord.
Amen!
A note at AllPoetry says:
To quote Causley himself "People always ask me whether this was a real boy. My God, He certainly was. Poor old boy, I don't know where he is now. I was thunderstuck when people thought I'd made it up! -he was a real bloke. Poor little devil."
He was, as poets go, widely read. Other poets liked him. Ted Hughes said “of all the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, Charles Causley’s could turn out to be the most lasting and the most important.” But it’s hard to find good critical commentary on him in my usual haunts (New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books etc).
In a fine academic essay on Causley, Rosemary Anne Walters attributes his critical oblivion to “simplified and restrictive categories. Subject-wise these are as a ‘Cornish’ poet, a ‘Children’s’ poet, a ‘Christian’ poet or a ‘World War Two’ poet, and in terms of form and style as primarily a writer of ballads and ‘traditional’ metrical verse.”
I’d add “good poet” to those. You just don’t see people with this kind of command very often. Everything I’ve seen so far is sharp and good, and there’s much more.